Indo-US bust up as diplomatic squabble intensifies

[David Guyatt]

Funny that. India also seems to have a system whereby the rich and powerful are allowed to fob off police inquiries into their corrupt practises and keep it secret. Just like the rest of the civilised world.

But it's okay to say this of the Indian wealthy and powerful, although saying it about UK, European or US would result in one being made persona non grata.

India-US row over arrest of diplomat Devyani Khobragade escalates

Security barriers at US embassy in Delhi removed and Indian MPs refuse to meet American delegates in reprisal for 'barbaric treatment' of envoy

• Jason Burke in Delhi
  
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 December 2013 13.51 GMT
  

A bulldozer removes a barricade outside the US embassy in New Delhi, as India launched a series of reprisals against the US over a diplomat's arrest in New York. Photograph: Findlay Kember/AFP/Getty Images

Bulldozers have removed security barriers outside the US embassy in Delhi as a diplomatic row prompted by the arrest of an Indian diplomat on visa fraud charges in New York intensified.
Devyani Khobragade, India's deputy consul general in New York, was charged last week with making false statements on an application for her housekeeper to live and work in the United States.
India's national security adviser on Tuesday called the treatment of Khobragade "despicable and barbaric" and the country's foreign secretary summoned the US ambassador. Politicians including Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and vice chairman of the ruling Congress party, and Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist opposition BJP refused to meet a visiting US congressional delegation.
The removal of the barriers was one of a slew of retaliatory actions taken by the Indian government as outrage at the arrest grew, including the withdrawal of import clearances and special airport passes. The incident has become a major story in India, dominating TV bulletins.
The arrest of Kobragade touches on a range of sensitivities in India. Special official privileges such as the right to use a red beacon light on an official car are minutely graded and valued in India. Unofficial privileges of the wealthy and powerful such as the ability to "settle" police inquiries without publicity are equally well-entrenched.
Much of the criticism in India of the arrest has focused on how Khobragade was treated as a "common criminal". According to Indian officials, Khobragade was arrested and handcuffed as she dropped off her daughter at school, then strip-searched and kept in a cell with drug addicts before posting $250,000 (£153,000) bail.
India is also acutely sensitive to its international image and status. Far less serious incidents have provoked major clashes in the past. Standard security checks in the US frequently make front-page news in India when they involve visiting dignitaries, who are ushered through airports as VIPs in their own country.
Prosecutors in New York say Khobragade, 39, claimed she would pay her Indian maid $4,500 a month when applying for a visa at the US embassy in Delhi to bring her to New York but actually paid her a third of the US minimum wage of about $10 an hour. She has pleaded not guilty to the charge, which could lead to a 10- year prison sentence, and plans to challenge the arrest on grounds of diplomatic immunity, her lawyer said last week.
In Washington, the US state department has said that standard procedures were followed during Khobragade's arrest. Officials argue that her immunity from prosecution extends only to actions directly connected to her position.
Khobragade's father, Uttam Khobragade, told the TimesNow TV news channel that his daughter's treatment was "absolutely obnoxious".
"As a father I feel hurt, our entire family is traumatised," he said.
In India most middle class families will employ at least one full-time domestic servant, possibly two and sometimes three or four. Wealthy households sometimes employ dozens, including drivers, cleaners, cooks, nannies and gardeners. Supporters argue that the custom provides a degree of welfare and social mobility for often illiterate workers from rural areas which otherwise would not exist. Critics say it reinforces a rigid hierarchy and is exploitative.
Public transport appears to be a particular point of tension for Indian dignitaries in the US. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a veteran of the Congress party, wrote that "Democracy in America apparently means the right of the lower orders to be rude to their social superiors" after a trip to the US last year.
In 2010 there was uproar after India's UN envoy, Hardeep Puri, was reportedly asked to remove his turban at a US airport and detained in a holding room when he was refused. A hands-on search of India's US ambassador Meera Shankar at an airport in Mississippi that year also prompted claims that India had been "insulted".
In 2009 Continental Airlines apologised to former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam for searching him in Delhi before he boarded a flight to the US, and in 2005 India's former speaker of parliament Somnath Chatterjeerefused to attend an international meeting in Australia without a guarantee that he would not have to pass through security.
Chatterjee said even the possibility of a security screening was "an affront to India."

[David Guyatt]

The list of measures India has taken in retaliation to the US arresting, handcuffing, strip and cavity searching their US diplomat, is quite extensive.

India hits back, row with U.S. hots up

SANDEEP DIKSHIT

SHARE · COMMENT (130) · PRINT · T+

• 
  The HinduIndian diplomat Devyani Khobragade's father Uttam Khobragade coming out of South Block after meeting External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid in New Delhi on Tuesday. Photo: V. Sudershan
  
  
• 
  The HinduDelhi Police remove barricades outside the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi on Tuesday. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma
  
  
• 
  The HinduA file photo of the U.S. consulate building in Mumbai. India on Tuesday stripped U.S. diplomats and their families of privileges including withdrawing all airport passes and stopping import clearances for U.S. missions in the country.
  
  
• 
  The HinduHome Minister Sushilkumar Shinde cancelled his meeting with a US delegation as a mark of protest against the treatment meted out to Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade.
  

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politics

diplomacy

Withdraws some privileges in retaliation for arrest of Indian deputy consul

India on Tuesday set in motion an array of retaliatory steps against U.S. diplomats based across the country for the manner of arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York, signalling the escalation of an unprecedented bilateral row.
The government asked all U.S. consular officers to turn in their identity cards and the entire American diplomatic corps their airport passes while senior Congress leaders snubbed a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation for the second straight day by refusing to meet it.
The government also ordered the Delhi Police to remove concrete barricades on public land and roads that have existed for years around the U.S. embassy, sought salary details and bank accounts of all Indian staff employed at the missions and stopped all import clearances for the U.S. embassy, especially for liquor.
The government's action was backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which urged the Centre to "match each and every step of the U.S., to take serious action in this matter to establish Indian sovereignty and prestige of its diplomatic community.'' Talking to newspersons, BJP leader Ravishankar Prasad also took a dig at the government by saying the U.S.' actions do "not accord to the level of friendship that the Indian government claims to have with the U.S''.
"We will deal with them exactly the same way they are dealing with us. Not anything more, not anything less. While the U.S. doesn't provide many courtesies to our diplomats, we go out of the way not to withhold those facilities. If they are downgrading what we are entitled to as diplomats, they will also get the same treatment. This way we will both be going strictly by the rules,'' said an Indian diplomat encapsulating the method behind the day's activity.
"We have put in motion what we believe is an effective way to address this issue, protect her dignity. We have communicated the essence we feel in diplomatic terms and also due to the human element,'' said External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid.
After Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar refused to meet the five U.S. Congressmen on Monday, Congress vice- president Rahul Gandhi and Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde declined to meet them on Tuesday in protest against handcuffing and strip search of diplomat Devyani Khobragade over a contractual issue with her help.
BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi also tweeted saying he had declined to meet the Congressmen in solidarity with the diplomat.
These "reciprocal steps" would "convey a clear message that this kind of treatment of a diplomat is unacceptable,'' said government sources handling the dispute. The former External Affairs Minister and BJP leader, Yashwant Sinha, called on the government to expel all gay partners of U.S. diplomats.
Dr. Khobragade was arrested last Thursday.

[Peter Lemkin]

I haven't bothered to investigate what is knowable about the alleged underpayment of and immigration fraud of her housekeeper. If true it is not nice...but, ALL diplomatic persons in all countries have diplomatic immunity from prosecution [the worst can be expulsion and having their credentials removed]. This break with international treaty and protocol by the USSA, and the needless vaginal searcheS [many!] of this Indian diplomat for a non-felony crime and one which involved no violence or drugs or weapons only goes to show the hubris and levels of depravity of the US and its police forces. India, IMO is morally right to dole out some harsh revenge and righteous anger to the US. I laugh with glee that the US Embassy in Delhi now doesn't have any 'blast or car bomb' barriers now!...and the diplomats there have been told to surrender their ID cards issued by India. Countries no longer fear quite as much as before telling Uncle Sam off...and that is a good thing all of its own! As a modern Marie Antoinette would say, 'Let them eat Whopper cakes'!

[Albert Doyle]

I can't help but think there is a sadistic element to the cavity searches.


Imagine a country so free that no one is exempt from sadistic cavity searches.

[David Guyatt]

Clearly, it was done to cause a fight.

[Magda Hassan]

India Flap derives from America's Gulag Practices and Far-Right Supreme Court

By Juan Cole | Dec. 19, 2013 |

The militarization of American police and humiliating practices of routine strip and cavity searches are the real culprits in the current diplomatic dispute between the United States and India. Police not only arrested the Indian deputy consul, Devyani Khobragade, who claims diplomatic immunity, on a minor visa and domestic labor charge, they put her in the general prison population and subjected her to a strip search.
Americans think of themselves as brave rugged individualists who enjoy the liberties of an Enlightenment constitution. In fact, they most often are timid and cowed in the face of the world's most powerful government, which increasingly acts like a medieval tyrant. Americans don't seem outraged that the government is spying on them. The government has put 6 million Americans either in prison or under correctional supervision, and has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world more than Cuba, nearly twice that of Russia, and more than 4 times that of Communist China! Only 8 percent of inmates in Federal penitentiaries are there for violent crimes. In many states, former prisoners are stripped of the right to vote. These extreme penal practices of course primarily target minorities and function as a racial control mechanism. (Famously, penalties in the US for using cocaine powder, a favorite in the white suburbs, are much less than for crack cocaine, mostly used by poor minorities.)
Not only does the US have an enormous number of people in jail but they subject arrestees (people not convicted of a crime) to routine strip and cavity searches. Women are often forced to be naked in front of the other inmates and to spread their labia for a policewoman.
These practices have been challenged. The ninth district federal appeals court in California decades ago found LAPD routine body cavity searches unconstitutional. But last year, our Supreme Court the same one that thinks corporations are people, that doesn't think big money campaign donors should have to identify themselves, and thinks it is all right for traditionally discriminatory states to pass voter suppression laws against minorities weighed in. It found constitutional routine strip searches even in minor traffic violations cases. A guy got a ticket. He paid it off, but it mistakenly stayed on his record. He bought a new house and went out with family to celebrate. He got stopped by police, who ran his registration and found the ticket. They handcuffed him in front of his family and hauled him off to six days in jail during which he was subjected to cavity searches. John Roberts thinks the whole thing perfectly reasonable. (The individual in question is an African-American).
So the strip search to which the deputy Indian consul in New York was subjected was just business as usual in the United States. She is not accused of carrying a weapon or being violent, but rather of underpaying her hired help. That charge is not frivolous, but it wouldn't obviously call for a search in her internal organs.
While police in India sometimes mistreat prisoners, they are behaving illegally when they do so. To have the official policy be to humiliate people routinely is outrageous to people outside the United States, especially where it concerns a woman diplomat who functions as a symbol of the nation. Khobragade's father said, "It is not Devyani's insult, but of the nation as she is representing the country. Devyani has been made a target, a scapegoat…. It is the outcome of tussle going on between the Ministry of External Affairs and US State department for the last two years…"
The way our government treats Americans is no longer inspiring to other peoples but rather it appalls them. German Chancellor Angela Merkel accused Barack Obama of running a STASI domestic spying operation via the NSA. (The STASI were the feared East German domestic surveillance organization, which kept files on most citizens and encouraged their neighbors to inform on them). Indian crowds are protesting over having their diplomat strip-searched. The spectacle of the humiliation of once-free Americans by an increasingly tyrannical incipient police state is causing other democracies to cringe in disgust.
On the other hand, some measures taken by the Indian government in protest have been childish. It removed the barriers in front of the US embassy in New Delhi that prevent suicide car bombers from getting close to the building. It is one thing to tell people to drop dead, it is another to arrange for them to do so. India is a postcolonial rising global power, and the combination of growing pride and confidence and memory of being kept down for two centuries by supercilious Western white Christian colonialists can sometimes make it prickly. Most countries would just have expelled a US diplomat in retaliation, not put up a sign on the US embassy saying "al-Qaeda welcome here."
NDTV has a video report on Indian retaliation against US diplomats in India
http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/americas...preme.html

[Albert Doyle]

Most countries would just have expelled a US diplomat in retaliation, not put up a sign on the US embassy saying "al-Qaeda welcome here."

Uh, they wouldn't be doing anything US intel didn't do on 9-11...

[Magda Hassan]

Only following orders.

Statement Of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara
On U.S. v. Devyani Khobragade

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
There has been much misinformation and factual inaccuracy in the reporting on the charges against Devyani Khobragade. It is important to correct these inaccuracies because they are misleading people and creating an inflammatory atmosphere on an unfounded basis. Although I am quite limited in my role as a prosecutor in what I can say, which in many ways constrains my ability here to explain the case to the extent I would like, I can nevertheless make sure the public record is clearer than it has been thus far.
First, Ms. Khobragade was charged based on conduct, as is alleged in the Complaint, that shows she clearly tried to evade U.S. law designed to protect from exploitation the domestic employees of diplomats and consular officers. Not only did she try to evade the law, but as further alleged, she caused the victim and her spouse to attest to false documents and be a part of her scheme to lie to U.S. government officials. So it is alleged not merely that she sought to evade the law, but that she affirmatively created false documents and went ahead with lying to the U.S. government about what she was doing. One wonders whether any government would not take action regarding false documents being submitted to it in order to bring immigrants into the country. One wonders even more pointedly whether any government would not take action regarding that alleged conduct where the purpose of the scheme was to unfairly treat a domestic worker in ways that violate the law. And one wonders why there is so much outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian national accused of perpetrating these acts, but precious little outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian victim and her spouse?
Second, as the alleged conduct of Ms. Khobragade makes clear, there can be no plausible claim that this case was somehow unexpected or an injustice. Indeed, the law is clearly set forth on the State Department website. Further, there have been other public cases in the United States involving other countries, and some involving India, where the mistreatment of domestic workers by diplomats or consular officers was charged criminally, and there have been civil suits as well. In fact, the Indian government itself has been aware of this legal issue, and that its diplomats and consular officers were at risk of violating the law. The question then may be asked: Is it for U.S. prosecutors to look the other way, ignore the law and the civil rights of victims (again, here an Indian national), or is it the responsibility of the diplomats and consular officers and their government to make sure the law is observed?
Third, Ms. Khobragade, the Deputy General Consul for Political, Economic, Commercial and Women's Affairs, is alleged to have treated this victim illegally in numerous ways by paying her far below minimum wage, despite her child care responsibilities and many household duties, such that it was not a legal wage. The victim is also alleged to have worked far more than the 40 hours per week she was contracted to work, and which exceeded the maximum hour limit set forth in the visa application. Ms. Khobragade, as the Complaint charges, created a second contract that was not to be revealed to the U.S. government, that changed the amount to be paid to far below minimum wage, deleted the required language protecting the victim from other forms of exploitation and abuse, and also deleted language that stated that Ms. Khobragade agreed to "abide by all Federal, state, and local laws in the U.S." As the Complaint states, these are only "in part" the facts, and there are other facts regarding the treatment of the victim that were not consistent with the law or the representations made by Ms. Khobragade -- that caused this Office and the State Department, to take legal action.
Fourth, as to Ms. Khobragade's arrest by State Department agents, this is a prosecutor's office in charge of prosecution, not the arrest or custody, of the defendant, and therefore those questions may be better referred to other agencies. I will address these issues based on the facts as I understand them. Ms. Khobragade was accorded courtesies well beyond what other defendants, most of whom are American citizens, are accorded. She was not, as has been incorrectly reported, arrested in front of her children. The agents arrested her in the most discreet way possible, and unlike most defendants, she was not then handcuffed or restrained. In fact, the arresting officers did not even seize her phone as they normally would have. Instead, they offered her the opportunity to make numerous calls to arrange personal matters and contact whomever she needed, including allowing her to arrange for child care. This lasted approximately two hours. Because it was cold outside, the agents let her make those calls from their car and even brought her coffee and offered to get her food. It is true that she was fully searched by a female Deputy Marshal -- in a private setting -- when she was brought into the U.S. Marshals' custody, but this is standard practice for every defendant, rich or poor, American or not, in order to make sure that no prisoner keeps anything on his person that could harm anyone, including himself. This is in the interests of everyone's safety.
Fifth, as has been reported, the victim's family has been brought to the United States. As also has been reported, legal process was started in India against the victim, attempting to silence her, and attempts were made to compel her to return to India. Further, the Victim's family reportedly was confronted in numerous ways regarding this case. Speculation about why the family was brought here has been rampant and incorrect. Some focus should perhaps be put on why it was necessary to evacuate the family and what actions were taken in India vis-à-vis them. This Office and the Justice Department are compelled to make sure that victims, witnesses and their families are safe and secure while cases are pending.
Finally, this Office's sole motivation in this case, as in all cases, is to uphold the rule of law, protect victims, and hold accountable anyone who breaks the law no matter what their societal status and no matter how powerful, rich or connected they are.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressrel...tement.php

[Albert Doyle]

Yes, Bradley Manning's nude searches and Abu Ghraib were all based on a common concern for safety for everyone's benefit. Heck, to be even more fair they should have done anal searches on the maid as well. You never know, she also could have had WMD up there...

[David Guyatt]

Justification, justification, justification.... We ought to write a song about it.

The question then may be asked: Is it for U.S. prosecutors to look the other way, ignore the law and the civil rights of victims (again, here an Indian national), or is it the responsibility of the diplomats and consular officers and their government to make sure the law is observed?

Obviously you should not look the other way. No one is suggesting this except you. Obviously, victims rights need upholding and, if the defendant is found guilty, she would be subject to the accepted punishment under guidelines of diplomatic standards. No one is suggesting otherwise, except you.

I know what, let's pose some wholly irrelevant questions as justification for our treatment.

They just don't get it do they...